I enjoy walking around the beautiful city of Flagstaff that I live in. I love the beauty of nature and everything that it inspires. I find that I can really disconnect from the world and relax from everything that life holds. This image was a spur of the moment decision. I was actually taking a picture of my fiancée, and saw the way the sun set through the weeds. I choose to snap this photograph and capture this ethereal feel that the sunset was creating.

I have an old Nikon D3100 and the lens that I have on my camera is originally from a film Nikon. It’s so old it doesn’t even have auto focus. But, this lens allows me to appreciate the work that goes into photography and it also helps me to take the perfect image, because I will stop and think through the photograph and take the needed time in order to create an image like this one. It’s just a standard 18-55mm lens. In order to account for the large amount of sun that was coming through the lens, I had a small aperture of around F 5.6 and a fairly quick shutter speed of 1/140. My ISO was set at 100.

For post processing, I always bump up the clarity. I love crisp image where you can practically jump into the photograph! I also like black and white image more than color. It is partially because of my personality. I like things in life black and white, yes or no. But, this image was so warm that I decided that it needed to have slight color brought into it. It’s just warm enough so you can get that feel of sun after winter. It’s as if it almost rejuvenates your soul. That’s the effect that I wanted this image to have. I wanted you to be able to look at it and just image how warm the sun felt on this day. I want you to be able to get lost in this image and forget about the world for just a second. Think about all of the wonderful things that have happened in your life instead of the bad.

That’s what I like my images to do. To allow the viewer to stop and catch their breath from the mundane day to day life and drift off into a fairytale and enjoy that moment, if just for a minute.

About the Photographer:
Hi! My name is Ashlee Outsen and I am a student at Northern Arizona University. I am majoring in Graphic design and minoring in photography. I have always been interested in the aspect of telling a story without using words. It gives people the opportunity to experience the photograph on their own rather then the entire story literally being spelled out before them. Photography has been a hobby for about 7 years now. That being said, I focus on landscape because it makes my heart happy.

For this image, I wanted to get the red cliffs in Sedona, AZ. So I drove down to Sedona on a Sunday and took some pictures of them and other parts of the scenery. The photo shown is one of the other scenery photos taken. For this photo, I walked to the top of a parking garage just off of the main road in Sedona, and I just started taking pictures of all the scenery I could get. I thought this image ended up being the best picture I got because it had the best ratio of the mountains and the bottom parts of shrubs and trees. I really like nature so the great scenery of Sedona inspired me to do this photo. I do not think I was trying to say anything with this photo; I just really liked the scenery and wanted to take a picture to remember the beautiful view I had at the top of the parking garage. In terms of thought process for this image I ended up using the height of the parking garage as a good vantage point so it could almost look like it was the edge of the valley, which it sort of is there. For this image I had no filter on the end of the lens. I was using my Nikon D5200 camera, with an 18-200 millimeter 3.5-5.6, which was just zoomed in to 38 millimeters. When shooting the image my aperture was at f/14 my ISO was at 250 and the shutter went off at 1/100. It was a bright day so I wanted the ISO to be lower so I would not get any noise. I had my f-stop so high so I could get the full focal range I needed for the image. It was not until days after taking the photo that I decided to put it into black and white. At first the sky was a little bit duller than I would like it to be, however I liked the tones everywhere else. So after toying with the saturation and the vibrancy, in adobe Lightroom I ended up putting the sliders all the way down to the left so it became black and white. I cropped in the image a little bit from the right, because there was a distracting part on the end that took away from the image so I cropped it in and that is my final product.

About the Photographer:
My name is Parker Munsch. I am a photography and criminal justice major at Northern Arizona University. I have been legitimately taking pictures for a year and a half now, but before that I was interested in the backgrounds of the images, like how it was shot and what editing went into the image. I prefer landscape photography, because I love the outdoors and like taking photos when I am in a cool new place. I really do not like to do much in post usually I just play with the tones and saturation. I try to do pictures that I like and the outdoors is an area that is very inspirational to me.

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About Me

Howdy! My name is Colleen Miniuk-Sperry and after spending 10 years stuck in a grey cubicle, I escaped Corporate America in 2007 and have been a full-time freelance photographer, writer, instructor, and speaker under the "CMS Photography" business name ever since. I specialize in nature, travel and outdoor recreation photography and writings. Besides being incredibly passionate (obsessed?) with photography and writing, I'm fluent in sarcasm, love French Chardonnay (though I don't discriminate against any type of wine), and much prefer dark, moody cloudy skies to clear blue ones. To read a full bio and to learn more about my work, please visit my main CMS Photography website at: www.cms-photo.com. Thanks for stopping by!

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About the Author

Colleen Miniuk-Sperry fled the grey cubicle walls and left her unfulfilling software engineering job behind at Intel Corporation in 2007 to pursue a more meaningful life as a full-time outdoor photographer, writer, publisher, instructor, and speaker. Her credits include National Geographic calendars, Arizona Highways, AAA Via, National Parks Traveler, On Landscape, and a broad variety of other publications. She has served three times as an Artist-in-Residence with Acadia National Park.

She authored the award-winning guidebooks, Photographing Acadia National Park: The Essential Guide to When, Where, and How and Wild in Arizona: Photographing Arizona’s Wildflowers, A Guide to When, Where, & How (1st and 2nd editions) as well as the instructional eBook, Seeing the Light in Outdoor Photography.

Colleen offers highly-acclaimed photography workshops and women’s photography retreats (called “Sheography™”) through her own company, CMS Photography, as well as Arizona Highways Photography Workshops, Arizona Wildlife Federation, The Nature Conservancy, and numerous private engagements in the past. She also provides inspirational and educational presentations at photography clubs, conferences, and symposiums, as well at art clubs and outdoor-related organizations across the country.

Colleen is an active member, Secretary on the Board of Directors for Outdoor Writers Association of America, where she served as the interim Executive Director in 2017.